Lost at Sea

Lost at Sea

El Faro, a 790-foot container ship, sank in 2015 off the coast of the Bahamas in Hurricane Joaquin. All 33 people on board died. It was the greatest American maritime disaster in 40 years, and the ship’s final hours were captured in remarkable detail on the ship’s voyage data recorder, a nautical black box. “The transcript of these conversations, as well as (one-sided) electronic communications among the captain, mates, engineers, able seamen and people ashore, runs to 500 pages,” Douglas Preston writes in his review of Rachel Slade’s “Into the Raging Sea.” “It is the most detailed live record of a maritime disaster ever created — and what a story it tells.”

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On this week’s podcast, Ms. Slade discusses her book and the “powerful and horrifying” experience of reading the transcript detailing the disaster.

She also talks about how the old ship was “an accident waiting to happen”; the hubris of shipping executives; the conflicting demands of commerce and safety; and whether any lessons have been learned after the tragedy. “When I first started writing this book, the working title for me was ‘How Many Mistakes Does It Take to Sink a Ship?’ The answer is almost countless,” she said. “There were so many things working against this ship and the people aboard.”

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